Social needs for personal authentication have been increased so that an authenticating apparatus using information about a personal organism has spread. The information about the personal organism to be used is generally a fingerprint and attention has also been paid to an iris pattern and a retina pattern. In the case that the iris pattern or the retina pattern is used for the personal authentication, there is an advantage that the iris pattern is preferably photographed in non-contact differently from the fingerprint.
However, if an excellent iris pattern cannot be photographed rapidly and precisely, a time taken for causing an authenticated person to wait is increased. As a result, the authenticated person feels uncomfortable. Therefore, it is necessary to guide the eye of the authenticated person into the front position of a camera for photographing the iris pattern, thereby photographing an excellent image of the eye.
FIG. 16 is a view showing the appearance of a conventional eye image pick-up apparatus described in JP-A-2000-5146, for example. A cold mirror 2 and an infrared illuminating section 3 are provided on the front face of a housing of an eye image pick-up apparatus 1, and a camera is built in the back side of the cold mirror 2. A marking mark 4 which indicates the position of a lens of the camera is provided on the center of the cold mirror 2. When a person to be authenticated stands in the front position of the eye image pick-up apparatus 1 to reflect his (her) own eye in the cold mirror 2, the camera acquires the image of the eye of the authenticated person.
However, in the conventional eye image pick-up apparatus, when the authenticated person judges that he (she) is in a correct photographing position in a state that the image of a right eye reflected in the cold mirror 2 is seen with a left eye or the image of the left eye reflected in the cold mirror 2 is seen with the right eye as shown in FIG. 17A, there is also a problem that the position of the middle of a forehead is placed on the center of a photographing screen 5 so that the right eye cannot be aligned with the center of the photographing screen 5 or the left eye cannot be aligned with the center of the photographing screen 5.
The invention has been made to solve the problems of the related art and has an object to provide an eye image pick-up apparatus which easily enables to guide the position of the eye of the authenticated person to a correct photographing position.